Data communications are becoming ubiquitous. They feature in most aspects of life and are becoming fundamental to households, businesses, personal lives, banking, shopping and communications. The increasing trend of interconnectivity and monitoring of systems and devices means that data communications will become more and more central to our daily lives for even the most mundane tasks.
Unfortunately, data communications are very easily spoofed. A recurring problem is that it is relatively straightforward for someone to pretend to be somebody else (or somewhere else) and produce an otherwise genuine looking data communication. While many networks have introduced safeguards or other countermeasures that look in detail at incoming communications to attempt to identify discrepancies, the truth is that there are loopholes and exploits available and only limited expertise is needed to implement them.
These exploits and spoofed communications are generally used for illicit/improper purposes ranging from unauthorised access of digital media content (it is commonplace for film and television producers to limit distribution to a particular territory so that the material can be syndicated to other territories at some later date to increase revenue) right the way up the scale to persons to scams and fraudulent transactions. While there may be legitimate uses for such exploits and spoofed communications, as a rule they are used to abuse trust or systems in place to protect the rights and property of others.
It is clearly desirable for data communications to be able to bear some mark of authentication. While there exist many authentication systems and methods, many in the field of cryptography using key exchange, shared secrets etc., these are complicated and generally require support from endpoints (which increases their cost and complexity).
One particular issue is the authentication of origin. There are systems that track data communications via network addresses such as IP addresses. However, these can be spoofed and are also unsuitable where a shared IP address is relied upon. Furthermore, the network address is usually provided by the network operator and may therefore be location agnostic. Depending on the manner in which network addresses are allocated, it is possible that a user based in London, UK, may have a network address that is only one increment different from a user having a network address in Durban, South Africa for example.
With the advent of virtual private networks and other tunnelling technologies, it is also possible to obtain a network address that is local to a particular populous whereas in fact the user is operating from a completely different country. Such exploits are well known for use in defeating copyright protection of streamed media such as television programmes where programs may be freely accessible in the country of origin but blocked from other countries in order to allow a network to exploit distribution rights.